What it is

Textio is the Seattle company, founded in 2014, that made “augmented writing” a recruiting category: software that scores a job post while you write it and predicts who will apply. It now sells two things with two buying motions. Textio Recruiting covers job posts, sourcing emails and careers copy, with the Textio Score, a Gender Meter and an Age Graph, plus a sibling product, Textio Feedback, for performance reviews. Lavalier, launched in March 2026, is an interview-intelligence platform built by the Textio team. It records interviews, prompts the interviewer live, and turns what candidates said into structured, comparable evidence against the role. Leadership changed in January 2026: COO Colleen Gallagher became CEO and Jensen Harris went back to CTO, the second CEO change in two years.

The question this page answers is the one buyers now ask first: in a year when Claude, ChatGPT and your ATS all write a passable job description for free, is a job-post language tool still worth a contract?

Why it shows up in Recruiting stacks

The score is trained on outcomes, not style. Textio grades every post and email against its dataset of real hiring outcomes to predict who will apply, including the demographic skew of the applicant pool. An LLM will produce a clean draft. It can’t tell you whether posts worded like this one have historically drawn a male-skewed applicant pool. That prediction is the product. The draft is not.
It lives inside the ATS editor. The Chrome extension puts guidance directly on the job-post screen in Greenhouse, Workday Recruiting, iCIMS, SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle Recruiting and Taleo. That matters when 200 hiring managers write their own posts and you can’t train each one.
Lavalier moves the company from the top of the funnel to the decision. Structured interview plans, live interviewer guidance, a Skills Matrix that maps interview evidence to role requirements, and company-values scoring added after launch. It is Textio’s answer to the fact that JD language alone no longer carries a contract.

Pricing

Textio Recruiting is quote-only on an annual contract. Vendr’s buyer data (45 purchases, updated February 2026) puts the median annual contract at $24,405, with a range of $9,600 to $52,197 and an average negotiated saving of 17.8% off the first quote. Budget on the median and treat anything above $40,000 for a sub-50-recruiter team as a first offer.

Lavalier is the opposite: self-serve with a public price list on credits.

Free — $0, 100 credits a month, unlimited users. No ATS integration, no reporting, no SSO.
Pro Starter — $499 a month, 500 credits, unlimited users. Adds ATS integrations, company-values programming and reporting.
Enterprise — custom credits, adds SSO.

A 31–60 minute interview costs 18 credits and setting up a role costs 25. Pro Starter therefore buys about two roles and 25 hour-long interviews a month, roughly $20 per interview-hour. Free covers one role and four interviews: enough for a pilot, not for a hiring team.

Best for

In-house TA leaders at English-language employers running 500+ requisitions a year (ooligo’s rule of thumb, not a vendor figure), where hiring managers draft their own posts in Workday, iCIMS or SuccessFactors and the TA team needs one enforceable standard, measured by a score it can report on. Lavalier suits the same buyer when interviews, not posts, are the weak link and the team wants structured interviewing for about $6,000 a year on Pro Starter, against BrightHire’s $18,000 median contract (Vendr, February 2026).

Not for you if you run fewer than about 200 reqs a year with a central team of two or three recruiters writing every post. A Claude prompt carrying your style guide and a banned-phrase list, plus Greenhouse’s built-in job-description generator, does the job for $0 marginal cost. Also not for you if a large share of your hiring is in non-English markets. Independent 2026 reviews report the scoring as English-only, so confirm coverage for every language you hire in before you sign.

Versus the alternatives

Your ATS’s native AI plus an LLM — the fastest-growing substitute, and the real competitor. Greenhouse AI generates suggested job descriptions, scorecard attributes and interview questions, all inside the ATS. Pick this when volume is low and you care about a good draft, not a measured outcome.
Datapeople (Payscale) — Payscale bought it in September 2025. It is strongest on JD governance and consistency across large job libraries. Pick it when you’re already a Payscale customer and want pay data next to the posting.
Ongig — public pricing: Lite at $4,900 a year (3 users, 100 jobs), Professional from $14,900, Enterprise from $39,900 with two-way ATS sync and job language translation. Pick Ongig when you need a job library with translation and a price you can see before the demo.
Metaview and BrightHire — the interview-intelligence incumbents Lavalier is up against. BrightHire has been inside Zoom since December 2025, and Metaview has repositioned around sourcing. Pick either when you need the deeper ATS write-back and a longer track record than a six-month-old product can show. See the interview-intelligence roundup.

Watch-outs

Two products, two contracts. Textio Recruiting is an annual enterprise agreement and Lavalier is a self-serve credit plan, so security review and the DPA can run twice. Guard: ask at the start whether Lavalier can be added to the existing Textio master agreement, and get the answer in writing before procurement opens a second review.
The free Lavalier tier strands your data. Without ATS integration, interview evidence never reaches the candidate record. Guard: pilot one role on Free, but budget Pro Starter before rollout. The pricing page doesn’t name which ATSs it supports, so confirm yours in writing.
Interview recording and AI evaluation are regulated. Recording needs every participant’s consent in all-party-consent US states, and GDPR requires a lawful basis and candidate notice. Values and skills scoring that substantially assists a hiring decision can pull the tool into NYC Local Law 144 bias-audit scope. Guard: turn on Lavalier’s consent management for every interview, and have counsel decide whether your use counts as an automated employment decision tool before you hire into New York City with it.
A score can become a vanity metric. Recruiters learn to write to the Textio Score, and the number rises without applicant quality moving. Guard: pair it with an ATS report on qualified-applicant rate for 20 reqs written before rollout and 20 after, and renew only if the second number moves.
Strategy is in motion. A new CEO and a second product line in the same quarter mean the roadmap you buy may not be the one you renew. Guard: take a 12-month term with a renewal price cap instead of the 10–20% multi-year discount Vendr reports, until Lavalier has a year of shipped releases behind it.

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